Wednesday, December 8, 2010

This newly processed collection consists of 21 albumen process stereograph cards of various Kentucky landscape scenes taken by local Lexington photographers Carpenter and Mullen. James A. Mullen, founder of Carpenter and Mullen, had an illustrious career in the 1860s. He operated galleries in New York and Cincinnati, worked for a Cincinnati photographer, the Engineering Corps, the State Geological Survey, and the Engineers of the Cincinnati Southern Railroad before settling into his Lexington Main street gallery.

Stereograph cards are an early form of three-dimensional photograph. First introduced in the 1850s, they were most popular between 1870 and 1920. To create stereograph cards a camera with multiple lenses, such as the one on the right, was used.

After the camera captured the images simultaneously, the two virtually identical photographs were printed side-by-side. When viewed with a stereoscope, like the one on the left, the image appears three-dimensional.

On the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 8, 1941, the Japanese attacked Clark Field in the Philippines. The Nunn Center has an interview in its Colonel Arthur L. Kelly Veterans Oral History Collection with Morgan French about this day. French served as a maintenance crew chief for the 192nd Tank Battalion, Company D. He participated in the delaying action in the Philippines, and describes the Japanese bombing of Clark Field, the subsequent battles, and the fall of Bataan. When the rest of the battalion surrendered, French and his maintenance section escaped to Corregidor. They were eventually captured by the Japanese at Fort Drum and taken to a prison camp in Cabanatuan. There, French was selected to go to Japan on a work detail. He recalls his “hell ship” voyage, prison camps in Tanagawa and Tsuruga, illness among the prisoners, and the prisoners’ work and acts of sabotage. Check out his interview on the Kentuckiana Digital Library, it is quite moving.